![]() ![]() Jammet came up with a roster of meal-like salads that shared what the founders came to describe as “the wink”: an element evoking something beloved and unsalad-ish. (He had loved the pike quenelles as a child.)Īt 22, set on giving vegetables mass appeal, Mr. Jammet, now the company’s chief concept officer, grew up watching his parents run La Caravelle, one of New York City’s most esteemed French restaurants until it closed in 2004. #SWEET GREEN PROFESSIONAL#None of Sweetgreen’s founders had professional cooking experience, but Mr. Sweetgreen took things a step further, eschewing soft drinks and red meat and forming relationships directly with its suppliers, like a farm-to-table restaurant made fast. Chipotle had pioneered assembly line ordering, scratch cooking and animal welfare standards in fast food. In the fast-food sector, salads haven’t traditionally been doorbusters - ever go to Chick-fil-A for the Cobb? - but Sweetgreen was using now-modish locally sourced ingredients at a moment when “wellness” was becoming a buzzword. Sweetgreen’s first location opened a few months after graduation, in an abandoned hamburger joint on M Street. “The trendy spot was the healthy cafe.” Back home, he enlisted two entrepreneurial classmates, Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru, and the three spent their senior year refining the idea in their dorm rooms and raising seed money from friends and family. “It was cool to live an active, healthy lifestyle,” he said. Neman, a recent Georgetown University undergraduate, had studied abroad in Sydney, Australia, and was inspired by its food culture. The first Sweetgreen opened in 2007, in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. “If we were to redo it, we would have still done all 10 things, but one at a time.” “We were so excited about this grand vision of this new store that we brought in like 10 new things at once,” Mr. Touch-screen ordering kiosks had been delayed, and perhaps that was for the best. (The experience “channels about as much tech-centric mindfulness and simplicity as Penn Station after a power outage,” wrote Ryan Sutton, the chief New York food critic for Eater.) “It’s a bit of a bottleneck.” A digital leader board, meant to indicate when orders were ready, had put up some customer names too early or too late. “The biggest pain point right now is the pickup experience,” Mr. ![]() Behind the scenes, the kitchen was having trouble assembling orders accurately, and there was a higher-than-normal volume of complaints. ![]() Still, the format was hardly a conclusive success. “When John Cusack puts the record on, and he’s like, ‘Watch me sell this record?’ It’s kind of like that.” ![]() #SWEET GREEN MOVIE#“Have you seen the movie ‘ High Fidelity’?” Nathaniel Ru, the company’s soft-spoken 34-year-old co-founder and chief brand officer, asked the room. #SWEET GREEN FREE#With the theater of salad assembly removed, a section of the restaurant had been dedicated to free tastings, and a line graph illustrating how this had boosted sales of some of the brand’s less popular bowls was greeted with murmurs of delight. Two weeks into the experiment, sales had beaten projections, and according to Timothy Noonan, Sweetgreen’s vice president of research and development, there were “a lot of positives about how customers are able to engage with the brand.” Visitors seemed to love the store’s “analog” (printed) menus, added for a touch of class - the covers were already showing wear - and the soft lighting and cushy banquettes in an upstairs seating area encouraged them to linger at dinnertime. While they wait they can mull adding one of the Sweetgreen baseball caps or $37 bottles of olive oil on display to the tab. Customers give orders to a tablet-wielding “ambassador,” if they haven’t done so ahead of time with their smartphones, retrieving their salads from alphabetized shelves. Up front, employees assemble Harvest Bowls, Kale Caesars and infinite customized variants from a spread of freshly prepared ingredients, in a ritual that has become a hallmark of the modern midday meal.Īt 3.0, to increase efficiency, the action had been moved offstage, to a kitchen in the rear. They were discussing a new store format, called Sweetgreen 3.0, that had recently been introduced in New York City after two years of planning.Īt Sweetgreen’s other 102 locations, customers brave queues that, at peak lunch, can make T.S.A. On a Wednesday morning last fall, several executives at Sweetgreen, the fast-casual salad chain, gathered around a conference table at their headquarters here. ![]()
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